Ask HN: How to apartment search in the bay?
I'm researching a move towards the bay area and curious what sources that people were successful with... (craigslist/padmapper)???
I'm a developer, is there an apartment search for hackers?
I'm a developer, is there an apartment search for hackers?
If you're local, another good approach is just to drive down the multi-family zoned areas in the valley (it's pretty obvious where they are if you live here, plus you can see them on satellite view in Google Maps), pop into the office, and ask if they have any vacancies coming up. Most blocks are pretty densely packed, so you can easily hit up half a dozen complexes in an hour and get a sense of what rents are like, how clean the complex is, how friendly the management is, what sort of people live there, etc. In my most recent apartment hunt I took a bike trip with my girlfriend - we just biked down a bunch of the residential neighborhoods in Sunnyvale and stopped at every apartment complex.
Another useful strategy is to take a short-term lease when you first move out, then once you're acclimatized, pick out the places you really want to live and ask if there're vacancies. You learn a lot of tacit knowledge about the area that way, eg. the California/Escuela area of Mountain View has a number of openings on Craigslist, but it also has a reputation of being kinda a bad neighborhood in MTV (nothing that'll put your personal safety at risk, but I know a couple people that were robbed while living there), and you'll only pick that up from living in the area and talking with locals there.